I went to the BM to see the exhibition of art from the medieval west African kingdom of Ife (now in Nigeria). Ife is most famous for some extraordinarily high quality naturalistic heads cast in brass or copper, although the exhibitions also has various other pieces, including terracotta heads in the same style, jewellery, animal pieces and [...]
Posts tagged with ‘art’
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Chris Ofili at Tate Britain
22 February 2010 – 10:33 am
Chris Ofili is a contemporary British artist who is, I suppose, best known for using balls of elephant dung in his paintings. Indeed I’ve been well-disposed towards Ofili for years, ever since The Daily Mail or some other self-consciously philistine rag decided to be terribly outraged when he was nominated for the Turner Prize. It’s [...]
‘The Real Van Gogh’ at the Royal Academy
3 February 2010 – 7:20 pm
Not that rubbishy fake Van Gogh that other galleries having been fobbing us off with, then.
The exhibition’s full title is ‘The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters’. The inclusion of some of Van Gogh’s letters supposedly provides a bit of biographical-intellectual-psychological context for the paintings. Which is an interesting idea, but calling it [...]
The Guildhall Art Gallery and Roman Amphitheatre
2 February 2010 – 4:27 pm
The Guildhall, for those who don’t know, was basically the town hall for medieval London; it is now the only surviving stone building in the City from before the Great Fire which isn’t a church. And, again for those who don’t know, when I say ‘the City’, I don’t mean ‘the city’; i.e. not the [...]
‘Mini Picture Show’ at the Bankside Gallery
19 January 2010 – 3:48 pm
I was given a membership of The Art Fund for Christmas. For those who don’t know, The Art Fund uses membership fees and other donations to help British museums and galleries to buy art for their collections; membership gets you discounted or free entry to a range of museums and galleries. So that was a [...]
‘The Sacred Made Real’ at the National Gallery
27 October 2009 – 2:44 pm
To quote their own blurb:
‘The Sacred Made Real’ presents a landmark reappraisal of religious art from the Spanish Golden Age with works created to shock the senses and stir the soul.
Paintings, including masterpieces by Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán, are displayed for the very first time alongside Spain’s remarkable polychrome wooden sculptures.
By ‘polychrome wooden [...]
Links
23 October 2009 – 11:00 pm
Ask a Nineteenth-Century Whaling Expert — Crooked Timber
read the comments as well.
(del.icio.us tags: economics whales )
GELITIN
Amusing bit of Japanese art. via VVORK
(del.icio.us tags: Japan art gardens )
‘Pop Life’ and ‘John Baldessari’ at Tate Modern
16 October 2009 – 4:43 pm
Two superficially very different exhibitions at Tate Modern at the moment. One is Pop Life: Art in a Material World; to quote the blurb:
Andy Warhol claimed “Good business is the best art.” Tate Modern brings together artists from the 1980s onwards who have embraced commerce and the mass media to build their own ‘brands’. Pop [...]
Links
26 September 2009 – 11:00 pm
CABINET // Artist Project / Trichopterae
'The images above illustrate the results of an unusual artistic collaboration between the French artist Hubert Duprat and a group of caddis fly larvae.'
(del.icio.us tags: insects art )
Links
14 August 2009 – 11:00 pm
Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3-D
'Using redshift data, a 3-D animated view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was created.' This video has been all over the place, but if you *haven't* already watched it, you should.
(del.icio.us tags: astronomy )
Caustic Cover Critic: Deeply Odd POD
'Here's the fourth of Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz books, [...]
Futurism at Tate Modern
18 June 2009 – 3:06 pm
I went along to the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. Having sometimes commented on the excellence of past Tate exhibition websites, I have to say they’ve fallen down on this one — nothing to see at all. And they also didn’t have any exhibition booklets, so I have no aide-mémoire at all.
EDIT: they now have [...]
Van Dyck at Tate Britain
1 May 2009 – 3:27 pm
I went to see the van Dyck exhibition at Tate Britain the other day. I can’t say I was very excited by the prospect, but I’m a member and it seems silly to miss exhibitions I can get into for free. Perhaps especially if you’re English, Anthony van Dyck seems like the most establishment figure [...]
‘Sickert in Venice’ at DPG
4 March 2009 – 4:53 pm
A exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery of Walter Sickert’s paintings from Venice. I’m not a fan.
‘Rodchenko & Popova’ at Tate Modern
20 February 2009 – 4:02 pm
I went to ‘Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism’ at Tate Modern today. I’ve seen quite a few exhibitions in the past few years that feature Aleksandr Rodchenko*, so I wasn’t really sure how much I would get out of it, but in the event I enjoyed it. Firstly I didn’t know anything about Liubov Popova, and [...]
The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling
8 December 2008 – 12:50 pm
The Unknown Matisse is the first of two volumes, taking our hero from 1869-1908. I actually bought it some time ago on Jee Leong’s recommendation, but it has taken me some time to finish, mainly I think because the simple physical size of it makes it slightly awkward to read in bed. It’s not that huge, [...]
Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery
10 November 2008 – 5:02 pm
Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian is an exhibition that does exactly what the title the suggests: it’s a selection of portraits by van Eyck, Titian, Raphael, Holbein, Botticelli, Dürer, Cranach and their contemporaries. Room after room of rather solemn looking people — no smiling for portraits back then — wearing their most expensive-looking velvets [...]
Flemish paintings at the Queen’s Gallery
1 November 2008 – 5:48 pm
I went yesterday to see Bruegel to Rubens — Masters of Flemish Painting at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. I wasn’t really sure what to expect; you have to love Bruegel, but I’ve always found Rubens easier to admire than to enjoy.
It turned out to be just the one Bruegel on show, with seven or [...]
Links
25 October 2008 – 11:00 pm
Multicolr Search Lab – Idée Inc.
Fun tool: 'We extracted the colours from 10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.'
(del.icio.us tags: colour Flickr )
BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | Council orders Banksy art removal
Good news from the [...]
Francis Bacon at Tate Britain
14 October 2008 – 7:55 am
I went to see the Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain today. And I enjoyed it, if enjoyed is the right word for work which is quite so bleak. He was an atheist who made a habit of painting crucifixions; and without the theology, a crucifixion is just a man being tortured to death.
So there were lots of trapped, screaming, [...]
Rothko at Tate Modern
7 October 2008 – 3:35 pm
I went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern today. The show is of his ‘late series’: the centrepiece is the Seagram Murals (i.e. the group of dark Rothkos which have been in the Tate for years, plus some related works that normally live in Japan), but there are also some other groups of works [...]
Mood music for the apocalypse
7 October 2008 – 9:30 am
It seems weirdly fitting that the Tate’s two current big exhibitions are Rothko and Bacon. I don’t suppose that the Tate can take any responsibility for the gloomy state of the world’s financial market: I don’t think it’s all because City bankers are popping over in their lunch break and being given the willies.
I wonder, though, [...]